I've been recording songs, however ineptly and infrequently, for a long time. Most of them have been on this site for hypothetical downloading (here). I don't sell them. If you take time out of your life to listen to them, that seems like a fair exchange to me.

They're now also on Spotify, so that you can not only listen to them, but even intermingle them with real music in playlists.

I've always just put my own name on them, but there are a bunch of people who share my name, and one of them already has an album that isn't mine on Spotify. So I've hereby and retroactively adopted the band-name Aedliga. This is pronounced "AID-li-guh", and has no meaning. It was also the name of one of my songs a few years ago, in which context it also meant nothing, but was the title track for that notional EP, so that there is now "Aedliga" by Aedliga on Aedliga. And there's aedliga.com and @aedliga, and furia.com/isthisbandnametaken now dutifully reports that the name is taken.

I make a very sidebarred appearance in the November 2014 Harper's Magazine Readings section (page 21), where they list some of the genres that amused them in my genre map. The choices seem a little random to me (why is "Yugoslav rock" funny?), and I can't explain why they felt "Viking" had to be capitalized, but it's cool to appear in a magazine I actually used to read.

I had limited expectations for applying the logic from The Sounds of Places, which is based on whole countries, to individual cities. Cities are smaller than countries, and data-wise, smaller usually means more random.

And maybe there is more randomness, overall, but there's enough non-randomness to be intriguing. Or, to put this another way, any chance that I wouldn't publish this evaporated when The Sound of Dundee turned out to, in fact, include the immortal "The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee" by Gloryhammer.

But statistically, the most popular "national" hits tend to get mixed in with the local stuff at some point, through sheer ubiquity. Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" is the most obvious example of this at the moment, a song so popular that it's basically representative of the distinctive listening of humans, or at least of American humans who use Spotify.

For amusement, though, here is a ranking of major US Cities by where on their most-distinctive current song chart "Shake It Off" ranks as of today. The cities at the top are the ones who have surrendered most unreservedly to "Shake It Off", either through genuine disproportionate enthusiasm, and/or because they just don't have anything better of their own to play. The ones at the bottom have maintained the strongest resistance to this invasion. The >100s at the very bottom show the cities where immunity is so strong that "Shake It Off" doesn't even make the top 100 most-distinctive songs.

#

City

1

Arlington VA

1

Chandler

1

Gilbert

1

Mesa

2

Akron

2

Albany

2

Anchorage

2

Cleveland

2

New Haven

2

Pasadena

2

Tucson

2

Worcester

3

Alexandria

3

Des Moines

3

Orange

3

Scottsdale

3

Vancouver

3

Wilmington DE

4

Hoboken

4

Plano

4

Pompano Beach

5

Gainesville

5

Hartford

5

Somerville

5

Syracuse

5

Tacoma

5

Wichita

6

Bellevue

6

Providence

6

Reno

6

State College

7

Colorado Springs

7

Santa Clara

8

Aurora

8

Little Rock

9

Littleton

9

Tempe

10

East Lansing

10

Tampa

10

Trenton

10

Virginia Beach

11

Irvine

11

Sunnyvale

12

Albuquerque

12

Chicago

13

Boise

13

Boston

13

Cambridge

13

Las Vegas

13

Philadelphia

13

Silver Spring

13

Spokane

14

Dayton

14

Jacksonville

14

Miami Beach

14

Overland Park

15

Durham

15

Eugene

15

Lexington

15

St. Louis

16

Raleigh

16

Washington DC

17

Boca Raton

17

Springfield MO

18

Greensboro

18

Greenville

18

Spring

19

Cincinnati

19

Hyattsville

19

Murfreesboro

20

Fremont

20

Fresno

20

Ithaca

20

Tallahassee

21

Bloomington

21

Indianapolis

21

Pittsburgh

23

Corona

23

Phoenix

24

Frisco

25

Columbia MO

26

Ann Arbor

26

Denton

26

San Luis Obispo

26

West Palm Beach

27

Grand Rapids

27

Madison

27

Norman

28

Norfolk

29

Jersey City

29

Orlando

29

San Jose

30

Lawrence

30

Louisville

31

Bakersfield

31

Omaha

32

New York

32

Richmond

33

Salt Lake City

34

Columbus

34

Lewisville

34

Oklahoma City

35

Milwaukee

36

Wilmington NC

37

Columbia SC

37

Santa Barbara

38

San Diego

39

Charleston

40

Lincoln

40

Toledo

41

Long Beach

41

Riverside

41

St. Paul

42

Urbana

43

Berkeley

44

Katy

44

Minneapolis

45

Buffalo

46

Stockton

47

El Paso

49

Fort Collins

54

Charlotte

55

Chapel Hill

55

Kansas City

55

Knoxville

55

Tulsa

56

New Orleans

57

Denver

58

Farmington

60

Concord

60

San Antonio

64

Baton Rouge

67

Birmingham

68

Hayward

73

Mountain View

81

Whittier

83

Seattle

85

Humble

86

Atlanta

86

Santa Monica

87

Grand Prairie

92

Memphis

>100

APO

>100

Anaheim

>100

Arlington TX

>100

Athens

>100

Austin

>100

Baltimore

>100

Boulder

>100

The Bronx

>100

Brooklyn

>100

College Station

>100

Dallas

>100

Detroit

>100

Fort Lauderdale

>100

Fort Worth

>100

Hialeah

>100

Hollywood FL

>100

Honolulu

>100

Houston

>100

Irving

>100

Los Angeles

>100

Lubbock

>100

Mesquite

>100

Miami

>100

Nashville

>100

Newark

>100

Oakland

>100

Portland OR

>100

Provo

>100

Rochester

>100

Sacramento

>100

San Francisco

>100

Santa Ana

Presumably none of this will bother Taylor, but "people who are not going to listen disproportionately are going to not listen disproportionately" wouldn't fit the meter of the song very well, so I assume that's why she didn't mention it.

Every Noise at Once has long existed in shades of gray. This isn't because I don't like colors. I've actually tried a few different ways to add color, mostly through inelegant expedients, but none of them seemed to me to be adding more clarity than confusion.

I'm not entirely certain this one doesn't also suffer that flaw, but in the spirit of experimentation, I'm going to go ahead and publish it. If it makes us unhappy, I can always go back to gray. So here:

The idea is to semi-subliminally surface some of the other analytical dimensions from the underlying music space, beyond the two that drive the XY axes, so that there's a little less visual flattening.

For example, in the section on the right, above, you can see the reddish color running from "garage punk blues" to "experimental rock" to "more classic garage rock" and "psychedelic blues-rock", and the light blue linking "alternative new age" to "abstract" to "new tribe". These are good associative threads.

And the maps within each genre (psychedelic blues-rock on the left, below, and abstract on the right) show both overall corresponding tints, and variable degrees of internal uniformity:

Logistically, this works by mapping three additional acoustic metrics into the red, green and blue color-channels. I arrived at this particular combination through not-at-all-exhaustive experimentation, so maybe I'll come up with a better one, but for the moment red is energy, green is dynamic variation, and blue is instrumentalness. I don't recommend trying to think too hard about this, as the combinatory effects are kind of hard to parse, but it gives your eye things to follow. As data-presentation this is rather undisciplined, but as computational evocation it seems potentially interesting nonetheless.

As part of a conference on Music and Genre at McGill University in Montreal, over this past weekend, I served as the non-academic curiosity at the center of a round-table discussion about the nature of musical genres, and of the natures of efforts to understand genres, and of the natures of efforts to understand the efforts to understand genres. Plus or minus one or two levels of abstraction, I forget exactly.

My "talk" to open this conversation was not strictly scripted to begin with, and I ended up rewriting my oblique speaking notes more or less over from scratch as the day was going on, anyway. One section, which I added as I listened to other people talk about the kinds of distinctions that "genres" represent, attempted to list some of the kinds of genres I have in my deliberately multi-definitional genre map. There ended up being so many of these that I mentioned only a selection of them during the talk. So here, for extended (potential) amusement, is the whole list I had on my screen:

Kinds of Genres(And note that this isn't even one kind of kind of genre...)

That was at the beginning of the talk. At the end I had a different attempt at an amusement prepared, which was a short outline of my mental draft of the paper I would write about genre evolution, if I wrote papers. In a way this is also a way of listing kinds of kinds of things:

The Every-Noise-at-Once Unified Theory of Musical Genre Evolution

There is a status quo;

Somebody becomes dissatisfied with it;

Several somebodies find common ground in their various dissatisfactions;

Somebody gives this common ground a name, and now we have Thing;

The people who made thing before it was called Thing are now joined by people who know Thing as it is named, and have thus set out to make Thing deliberately, and now we have Thing and Modern Thing, or else Classic Thing and Thing, depending on whether it happened before or after we graduated from college;

Eventually there's enough gravity around Thing for people to start trying to make Thing that doesn't get sucked into the rest of Thing, and thus we get Alternative Thing, which is the non-Thing thing that some people know about, and Deep Thing, which is the non-Thing thing that only the people who make Deep Thing know;

By now we can retroactively identify Proto-Thing, which is the stuff before Thing that sounds kind of thingy to us now that we know Thing;

Thing eventually gets reintegrated into the mainstream, and we get Pop Thing;

Pop Thing tarnishes the whole affair for some people, who head off grumpily into Post Thing;

But Post Thing is kind of dreary, and some people set out to restore the original sense of whatever it was, and we get Neo-Thing;

Except Neo-Thing isn't quite the same as the original Thing, so we get Neo-Traditional Thing, for people who wish none of this ever happened except the original Thing;

But Neo-Thing and Neo-Traditional Thing are both kind of precious, and some people who like Thing still also want to be rock stars, and so we get Nu Thing;

And this is all kind of fractal, so you could search-and-replace Thing with Post Thing or Pop Thing or whatever, and after a couple iterations you can quickly end up with Post-Neo-Traditional Pop Post-Thing.

And it would be awesome.

[Also, although I was the one glaringly anomalous non-academic at this academic conference, let posterity record the cover of the conference program.]

At Spotify, where I work, we have listeners in a large and growing numbers of countries around the world. You might theorize that people in different countries listen to different music. You might be curious to hear this music. If you are me, you might be really curious, to the point of a kind of obsessive, consuming fear that there is awesome and bizarre and wonderful music in, say, Estonia, that you're not hearing.

We do, in fact, have per-country top-track charts in Spotify itself. These measure the absolute popularity of tracks among the sub-population listening in a given country. Statistically, though, these charts tend to be fairly well dominated by global hits. This isn't a technical flaw, but it does mean that those charts are not especially useful for the purpose of musical tourism. When I say I want to hear what they're listening to in Estonia, I mean that I want to hear what they're listening to Estonia that, proportionally speaking, nobody is listening to anywhere else. I want to hear the music that is most uniquely Estonian, or more precisely the music that is most uniquely loved by Estonians.

So I've been experimenting with code to generate the kind of additional alternate chart that I mean, measuring the most distinctive listening of a country. It's not perfect, and the occasional global hit wanders in due to emotionally irrelevant factors like regional licensing contingencies. But for the most part these charts do appear to be rather effectively getting past the global to the local.

I was going to share an alphabetized list of these, for anybody who shares my curiosity. But I have this code to produce visual maps of music groupings, and it's just as easy to feed it countries as it is to feed it genres. And thus I've done the somewhat bizarre exercise of producing a visual remapping of inherently geographic data using non-geographic coordinates.

This sounds silly, I think. But it turns out to be surprisingly interesting. Here's the map:

This is a readability-adjusted scatter-plot of two acoustic variables averaged across a few thousand of the most popular and representative songs from each country.

The vertical axis is a metric quality we call "bounciness", so the countries at the top are characterized by denser and more atmospheric music, and the countries at the bottom are characterized by sparer music with spikier beats and more space between them. E.g., the constant roar of atmospheric black metal or the slow humming whir of classical organ music would be at the top, and the jumpy beats of hip hop or the pulse of reggae would be at the bottom.

The horizontal axis is another score we call "organism". The countries towards the left are characterized by music with more electric arrangements and/or more mechanical rhythms. The extreme of this quality gets you relentless techno. The countries towards the right are characterized by music with more acoustic arrangements and/or more human and variable rhythms. The extremes of this get you jigs and reels, or sitars.

[The main genre map is the other way around, with bounciness from left to right, and organism up and down, but this way we get Scandinavia at the non-geographic north, and China and India towards the non-geographic east!]

But what's intriguing here, obviously, is not where individual countries appear, but which countries cluster together. Japan, Australia and Canada all basically fall into acoustic Scandinavia. Africa and the Caribbean form a unified acoustic southern hemisphere. Malaysia is acoustically closer to Slovakia than to China, and Lebanon is acoustically closer to South Korea and Mexico than to Iran. I feel like we are detecting at least the faint echoes of a kind of cultural truth.

Click any country to see the calculated playlist of the 100 most distinctively popular songs in that country. You need Spotify for this to work, and as you'll discover, in some cases international publishing rights work counter to personal curiosity, and less than 100 will actually be available for you to stream. If you're extra-curious, in Spotify Preferences you can uncheck "Hide unplayable tracks", and then you'll at least get to see all 100.

Estonia turns out to be pretty much exactly as awesome as I imagined it had to be if I could only hear it.